Paul Ryan And The GOP's Hardening Heart

As most conservatives swoon over Rep. Paul Ryan, Mitt Romney's choice to run for vice president, David Stockman, Ronald Reagan's first budget director, isn't impressed:

Mr. Ryan showed his conservative mettle in 2008 when he folded like a lawn chair on the auto bailout and the Wall Street bailout. But the greater hypocrisy is his phony “plan” to solve the entitlements mess by deferring changes to social insurance by at least a decade.

A true agenda to reform the welfare state would require a sweeping, income-based eligibility test, which would reduce or eliminate social insurance benefits for millions of affluent retirees. Without it, there is no math that can avoid giant tax increases or vast new borrowing. Yet the supposedly courageous Ryan plan would not cut one dime over the next decade from the $1.3 trillion-per-year cost of Social Security and Medicare.

Instead, it shreds the measly means-tested safety net for the vulnerable: the roughly $100 billion per year for food stamps and cash assistance for needy families and the $300 billion budget for Medicaid, the health insurance program for the poor and disabled. Shifting more Medicaid costs to the states will be mere make-believe if federal financing is drastically cut.

Likewise, hacking away at the roughly $400 billion domestic discretionary budget (what’s left of the federal budget after defense, Social Security, health and safety-net spending and interest on the national debt) will yield only a rounding error’s worth of savings after popular programs (which Republicans heartily favor) like cancer research, national parks, veterans’ benefits, farm aid, highway subsidies, education grants and small-business loans are accommodated.

No means tests for entitlements plus cruel safety-net shredding that will punish the poor while saving virtually no money. That's the Tea Party platform in a nutshell, as Timothy Noah wrote in January when he listed all the big-government programs these so-called conservatives love.

There's actually a difference between being conservative and being selfish. In his book Our Divided Political Heart: The Battle for the American Idea in an Age of Discontent, E.J. Dionne describes a telling split between tea party thinking and the more compassionate conservatism proclaimed and sometimes practiced by Republicans in other eras:

While 50 percent of white evangelicals and 46 percent of Christian conservatives said 'it is not a big problem if some people have more of a chance in life than others,' 64 percent of Tea Party supporters felt that way."

That's two-thirds of the Ryan fan club saying to those who lack the opportunity to thrive, "I've got mine. It might not be your fault you don't have yours, but pound sand anyway." The new America?

Takes One To Know Some

Linguistics professor and left-wing activist Noam Chomsky on today's GOP, in which he thinks Eisenhower, Nixon, and even Reagan would be considered radicals:

The Republican party now has its catechism of things you have to repeat in lockstep, kind of like the old Communist party. One of them is denying climate change....

It happens that there's a huge propaganda offensive carried out by the major business lobbies, the energy associations, and so on. It's no secret, they're trying to convince people that the science is unreliable, that it's a liberal hoax. Those who want to be funded by business and energy associations and so on might be led into repeating this catechism. Or maybe they actually believe it.

The Republican-dominated House of Representatives is now dismantling measures of control over environmental destruction that were instituted by Richard Nixon. That shows you how far to the right they have gone. Today Nixon would be a flaming radical and Dwight D. Eisenhower would be off the spectrum. Even Ronald Reagan would be on the left somewhere. These are interesting, important things happening in the richest and most powerful country in the world that we should be very much concerned about.

The Democrats Deserve A Contender

Her mind boggling at the condition of the modern GOP, my Georgia-based cousin Bebe Bahnsen, a lifelong Democrat, misses the thrill of facing worthy opponents:

As I told a Republican friend the other night, moderates in his party will have a wonderful opportunity to shape its restructuring if they lose in November. Conservatives would still be a critical part of the GOP but I dare to dream that folks who oppose contraception, for instance, would have less voice.

Then, in 2016, we could have a good, old-fashioned election that, of course, I would still want Democrats to win.

Those Wacky Conservatives

George Will would just as soon re-elect Barack Obama.

Birth Control And The Dufus Vote

After weeks of conflict over the peripheral question of whether employees of Roman Catholic institutions should be offered free birth control, the New York Times finally gets to the nub of the the matter -- the Obama administration's requirement that all employers offer contraception to insured employees:

Over all, 63 percent of Americans said they supported the new federal requirement that private health insurance plans cover the cost of birth control, according to the survey of 1,519 Americans, conducted from Feb. 13 to Feb. 19 for the Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation. The poll has a margin of sampling error of plus or minus three percentage points.

While 8 in 10 Democrats said they supported requiring birth control coverage, only 4 in 10 Republicans did. Six in 10 people calling themselves independents voiced approval. Many Americans, in the survey and in independent interviews, expressed impatience with the focus on women’s reproductive issues in an era of economic distress.

As I've argued to conservative friends, the religious freedom issue is relatively trivial compared to the federal government deciding in its great wisdom that of all the procedures and medications that could be free of charge, including hay fever pills, Lipitor, and prostate cancer screening, the nod now goes to birth control and other women's health services.

What are the feds up to, anyway? One motive is equity. If women seem to be unduly advantaged under the Obama health care reform, perhaps it's because in the past they've been charged higher premiums than men and had to endure pregnancy being defined as a preexisting condition. Providing free birth control is in the insurance companies' interests as well, since contraception is cheaper than prenatal and obstetrics care during an unplanned pregnancy.

Far more important, the policy will reduce the number of abortions. The more birth control, the fewer abortions. Nothing could be more obvious, except to two powerful constituencies. The first is the Roman Catholic church, which in its absolutism equates never-pregnant with getting an abortion. In doing so, it facilitates more abortions, especially in the developing world. (The Protestant view of contraception runs the gamut.) A theologically sound way out of the thicket of Humanae Vitae, the 1968 papal encyclical on reproduction, is to compare the emotional condition of the parents when an abortion occurs vs. the moment of contraception. God can tell the difference between a fetus and a sperm and egg that are never formally introduced, and so can almost everyone else. Catholic women in the U.S. have figured it out for themselves, thereby writing smarter theology than the pope.

But understanding women's perspectives is not the Vatican's specialty, nor indeed Rush Limbaugh's, who viciously attacked a Georgetown law student, Sandra Fluke, who testified before Congress about a friend who lost an ovary because she couldn't get birth control. I'd like to think he'll get spanked for his 13-year-old's potty mouth -- at least a few lost advertisers. Critics are demanding that Republicans denounce him, but they probably won't*. He's powerful, because some people like what he says. On this issue, he's channeling the creepy vein of misogyny that lingers in our culture and crops up during debates over women's reproductive rights. Remember that women didn't even get the vote in the U.S. until 1920. Even today, some smile inwardly when Rush calls Sandra Fluke a whore.

So the second powerful constituency preventing a rational discussion of contraception is composed of ignoramuses and dufuses. That's why on this issue, which is all about reducing the number of unplanned pregnancies and abortions, I'm sorry to say that Big Brother knows best.

*After posting this, I learned that this morning Speaker of the House John Boehner released a statement saying that Limbaugh's comments about Sandra Fluke were "inappropriate." Carly Fiorina, last year's GOP candidate for the Senate in California, said they were "incendiary" and "distracting."

The New Paternalism

Andrew Sullivan sticks up for Nixon speechwriter, presidential candidate, and pundit Pat Buchanan, fired this week by MSNBC:

Sixteen years ago, when I came out as HIV-positive and quit [The New Republic's] editorship, Buchanan, who had sparred relentlessly in public with me over gay equality, wrote me a personal hand-written note. He wrote he was saddened by what he heard - which was then regarded as an imminent death sentence - and wanted to say how he would pray that I would survive, if only so we could continue to argue and fight and debate for many more years. He was one of only two Washingtonians who did such a thing. I was moved beyond words. But he knew I loved a good argument as well. Over a gulf of ideological and philosophical difference, we could debate reasonably.

He's a complicated man and I will not defend for a second his views on many things. But he is also a compassionate and decent man in private and an honest intellectual in public. It says everything about the polarization of our discourse and the evolution of cable news into rival sources of propaganda that this ornery figure, still churning out ideas and books while others his age are well in retirement, is now banished.

For shame. Another step backward from real debate on cable "news".

Buchanan is indeed gracious in person, as I can attest from his and Shelley's periodic visits to the Nixon library when I was director. I haven't read the book that angered MSNBC, but I'm well aware of the broad outlines of his sometimes bizarre thinking -- diversity is hurting the United States, the U.S. shouldn't have have entered World War II, it would be better if we could return to the social and cultural conditions he remembers from his 1950s boyhood in Washington, D.C. He's also accused of antisemitism and excessively harsh criticism of Israel's allies in the U.S., although on this question his often-derided views about Jewish influence on our media and politics don't differ dramatically from those of Palestinians' advocates in progressive circles.

It's also important to remember his opposition to the Iraq war, a classic if lonely expression of conservative isolationism. Although in her memoirs Condi Rice makes a respectable case for the Bush administration's process in the run-up to war in 2003, I'm still not sure Buchanan was wrong.

I don't defend his more noxious views, which Howard Kurtz wrote had become too "radioactive" for a cable network that Kurtz says has moved sharply left, as it evidently grasps for Fox News' intellectual near-irrelevancy. It's funny Kurtz used that word. In the early 1980s I was part of a Nixon team reading through White House files to flag documents we felt should be kept secret on privacy and other grounds. The same adjective occurred to us as we read some of Buchanan's pugnacious prose on the antiwar movement and class politics, foundational expressions of what later became known as the culture wars. As I recall, I wrote a letter that Nixon signed and sent to Buchanan saying jokingly that he needn't worry, because we'd buried his memos in lead-lined drums under the National Archives. Of course Nixon also got memos from Daniel Patrick Moynihan, Ray Price, and other more moderate advisers and aides. He usually wanted to hear all perspectives on difficult questions before he made up his mind. On other occasions, such as when Buchanan was writing for Vice President Spiro Agnew, Nixon let Pat's right-wing freak flag fly. Here Buchanan seems to be quoting Agnew reading a script by Buchanan.

I also concur with Sullivan that one needn't agree with Buchanan to oppose his firing. Chris Matthews, who expressed regret about his bosses' move, isn't an apologist for racism, antisemitism, or homophobia. He's an advocate for vigorous debate as a hallmark of a healthy democracy. The man who fired Buchanan, Phil Griffin, exhibits more authoritarian impulses, believing that his views "should [not] be part of the national dialog." That reminds me of another example of the annoying new paternalism among our cultural and political elites: Rick Santorum saying that contraception is "not okay" and that as president he'd try to limit its availability. What happened to media tycoons and politicians who gave us credit for thinking for ourselves?

If The Mitt Doesn't Fit

A cartoon from The Moderate Voice

They'd Rather Reagan Than Romney

John Fund on the significance of Rick Santorum's trinity of wins this week:

Mitt Romney doesn’t seem to realize he is campaigning for two jobs, not one. He is doing quite well in the race to become the Republican nominee for president, and must still be considered the strong favorite. But ever since Barry Goldwater captured the GOP nomination in 1964, the Republican nominee has been more or less the titular head of the conservative movement, the most important single component of the Republican party. It is that race that Romney is doing so poorly in, as evidenced by the willingness of many conservatives to vote against him.

Romney would help himself and his party if he realized that he will have a much higher chance of winning the general election if he reaches out to conservatives and convinces them to be enthusiastic. It’s one thing to win the vote of every anti-Obama voter in the country, but on his current trajectory Romney will fail to convince many of them to make that extra effort to get their friends and neighbors to the polls. That could ultimately mean the difference between victory and defeat — and for now Romney seems oblivious to that fact.

In response, Conner Friedersdorf argues that the right's quest for a reliable ideological champion is highly impractical, since few GOP presidents actually governed as conservatives -- especially Richard Nixon, who was way to the left of Barack Obama, and even Ronald Reagan, under whom taxes and the federal government grew inexorably.

True enough. But the Fund-Freidersdorf exchange fails to address two distinct but related possibilities. First, Romney might not want to be the leader of the conservative movement as it now exists. A moderate his one time in government, as a presidential candidate he's a Potemkin conservative who's trying to do the right-wing mystery dance but is stepping on everyone's toes because he can't wait to waltz to the center in the general election and in office. And conservatives, sensing that this is true, may prefer that Romney, even if he manages to get nominated, will lose so they they can spend Obama's second term Reagan-questing for 2016, and then for 2020, and forever. For these conservatives, a moderate in the White House, a pretender to the leadership of their movement, is a perfect vision of hell.

Just A Little Nuance, Please, Gov. Romney

Did Mitt Romney even consider staking out a thoughtful position on this issue, decrying abortion, as he now does, but acknowledging PP's work in providing care to women who wouldn't get it otherwise? Here's just one example from this morning's Orange County Register, about an unemployed woman with no health insurance who learned that she could get a free breast screening at PP:

[Monique's] Benoit's mammogram led to an ultrasound and then more tests that found a benign cyst in her breast. That was followed by an operation to remove the mass. Her total bill for the entire process? A $30 lab fee. The rest was covered by Planned Parenthood with funds from the Orange County Komen affiliate.

Just a little nuance, Gov. Romney. A grownup's acknowledgment of the complexity of issues in a vast, diverse country. Or is that just too risky in this era of lock-step absolutism masquerading as conservatism?

The Romneys' past support for PP is detailed here.

Even More Of Us Are Keynesians Now

Tory Andrew Sullivan looks at the numbers and tilts against austerity:

For me, the true test of conservatism is empiricism. It doesn't look as if the Ron Paul medicine is currently working very well (although some of that blame must surely lie with the massive debt that Blair and Brown, like Bush, piled up in the last decade). Nonetheless: this is the data. Britain has flatlined or declined in the last six months. The US has grown.

So here's an obvious retort to Romney and his Obama-Is-A-European schtick. Obama should simply say that it is Romney who now wants to impose European-style austerity, and it isn't working. Obama, meanwhile, has chosen an American exceptionalism strategy, which is leading to growth. By relying on that renowned British homosexual, JM Keynes.

Milhous And Son

In his first outing as a regular Rolling Stone columnist, Nixonland author Rick Perlstein writes about lessons he thinks Mitt Romney learned from his father, George, and from the way Richard Nixon defeated him in the 1968 GOP primaries. Father and son are shown above in 1964. Perlstein describes the elder Romney as a paragon of progressive Republican rectitude whose critique of the Vietnam war was misunderstood and unfairly devalued. In 1968,

[Nixon ran] what you might call a robotic campaign, just [BSing] about Vietnam, hinting he had a secret plan to end it. The truth was a dull weapon to take into a knife fight with Richard Nixon – who kicked [George] Romney's ass with 79 percent of the vote. When people call his son the "Rombot," think about that: Mitt learned at an impressionable age that in politics, authenticity kills. Heeding the lesson of his father's fall, he became a virtual parody of an inauthentic politician. In 1994 he ran for senate to Ted Kennedy's left on gay rights; as governor, of course, he installed the dreaded individual mandate into Massachusetts' healthcare system. Then he raced to the right to run for president.

Nixon's famous for promoting the truism that Republicans should run to the right in primaries and the center in the general. Perlstein makes some intriguing points. But if the main one is that Mitt Romney's following Nixon's advice, he's hardly the first, and he won't be the last as long as the nomination process is so heavily influenced by social conservatives. I'm not arguing in favor of inauthenticity as a leading political virtue. But the fact is that no one admitting to the mortal sin of being a moderate can be nominated in today's GOP, leaving the candidate who may still believe in the broad-gauge, non-ideological party of Lincoln, Rockefeller, and Nixon the choices of not running, changing parties, or playing hide the pragmatist.

Perlstein believes that Romney, if he's nominated, will stay right during the general election. "[T]he party won't have it any other way," he writes. But Romney's outfoxed the party so far, evading one conservative challenger after another in the GOP fire swamp (though he was singed last night in South Carolina). What activists will expect from him in return for their eventual grudging support is something he'll have to take into account. Nixon's advice the day after the convention would be: "You owe them nothing." By the same token, some on the right may decide that a Romney loss would be better in the long run. If a few conservatives end up staying home, so be it, because with or without them, only the Massachusetts moderate has a chance against Barack Obama.

Are Rightwingers Just Being Coy?

Ed Kilgore says most GOP conservatives have already resigned themselves to Mitt Romney, in part because of their misgivings about the other candidates:

“[T]rue conservatives” have doubts and divisions about the ideological reliability of Mitt’s surviving rivals. Santorum is regarded by some as an Washington insider and Big Government Conservative. Newt’s heresies were amply aired by those attack ads in Iowa. And Perry, the closest thing to a consensus “true conservative” candidate, greatly upset believers with his position on immigration.

And so, conservative leaders may well be asking themselves: Is the dubious value of nominating Santorum or Gingrich or even Perry instead of Romney worth the risk of creating the foundation for an Obama campaign assault on the eventual winner as a flip-flopping opportunist with the character of a feral cat?

Buckley's Social Network

Michael Kimmage on the influence of William F. Buckley, Jr.:

Buckley’s power, as a conservative, was the power of association. He made connections where connections had previously been tenuous or non-existent. He united conservatives in journalism, academia, government, and corporate America, sometimes in print and sometimes around the dinner table. He associated the young with the old, the ideologues with the philosophers, and the lovers of economic liberty with the lovers of natural law. In doing so, he helped associate the Republican Party with his preferred synthesis of social conservatism, libertarianism, and a foreign policy of Wilsonian outreach.

From A Cantor To A Gallop

Steve Benen hammers House minority leader Eric Cantor for his and and an aide's bizarre assertion that Ronald Reagan, who raised taxes more than any predecessor, didn't raise taxes:

Why do Cantor, his press secretary, and Republicans everywhere deny what is plainly true? Because reality is terribly inconvenient: the GOP demi-god rejected the right-wing line on always opposing tax increases; he willingly compromised with Democrats on revenue; and the economy soared after Reagan raised taxes, disproving the Republican assumption that tax increases always push the nation towards recessions.

In other words, Reagan’s legacy makes the contemporary Republican Party look ridiculous. No wonder Cantor’s press secretary started yelling: [Leslie] Stahl [who was interviewing Cantor on CBS] was bringing up facts that are never supposed to be repeated out loud.

Reagan was guilty of other acts of apostasy against 21st century hyper-conservatism as well. Cantor looks silly saying otherwise. Could it be this is the first time he ever got the question, at least in a setting where a camera was boring in so tight that you could see the pores under his makeup? If so, good for Stahl.

Here's what he should've said: "President Reagan was the first to stand in the path of the prevailing policy juggernaut of his time and say, quoting Bill Buckley the only time he used a one-syllable word, 'Stop!' Of course he didn't accomplish all he hoped when it comes to diminishing the size and scope of a coercive federal establishment. Of course he sometimes had to compromise. His courage inspires us not to."

Or some such. I don't really want Cantor to sound smarter, because he's been wrong about the budget.

Mitt A Little Bit Of Luck

Ed Kilgore explores why the right couldn't beat Romney.

Moderately Overlooked

As historians such as Rick Perlstein and Sam Tanenhaus mull the rightward progression of the GOP and conservatism from the age of Nixon to the age of Beck and Hannity, historian Maarja Krusten starts with her mother, a Nixon fan right through Watergate's bitter end, especially because of his foreign policy. Today, she doesn't watch Fox News, and she reasons that you can't balance the budget without more revenue. Her daughter concludes:

Nixon was a moderate and a pragmatist. He was not a conservative. Nor were all his supporters. Did some Nixon voters later vote for Reagan and become Fox News fans? Absolutely. Yet there also were people such as my Mom. There’s a lot in the mix. As with all issues Nixonian, working through the motives and objectives requires discernment.

Among other things, one discerns that moderates are dissed, devalued, and demoted. We don't have a cable station. Few if any Republicans would dare utter the word "moderate" without swearing or spitting. At first blush, we indeed appear to be a dwindling tribe. According to Gallup, the percentage of Americans identifying themselves as moderates has fallen from 43% to 35% since 1992. During the same period, self-identified conservatives increased from 36% to 40%, while the liberals edged up from 17% to 21%. That means we've lost 4% each on both ends of the spectrum, a symptom, Gallup says, of our increasingly polarized politics.

But those numbers, while great news for Fox News' and MSNBC's ratings, aren't so great for the GOP's general election chances in 2012. Conservatives are prone to saying that moderates are really liberals. Spend three minutes on FreeRepublic, and you'll get the picture. Stipulating their point for the purposes of argument, that makes the U.S. electorate 56% (liberals plus moderates) to 40% conservatives. Nixon's oft-quoted dictum was that Republican candidates always had to scurry to the center to contend in general elections. This year, primary-season contenders will have had to spend so much time in birtherland and Obama-ignored-Easterland that reclaiming a sufficient share of the center back from the president may be impossible.

Conservative Devolution

Andrew Sullivan presents evidence of the U.S. right's intellectual decline. 1) Defending Sarah Palin's gaffes and refusal to deal in substance, her adherents proclaim that people used to say the same thing about Ronald Reagan. 2) Compared to Palin, Reagan sounded like Socrates.

The Godless Right

Conservative atheists.

Looky-Cues

Ever noticed, when you're talking to someone and happen to look away for a moment, the person looks in that direction, too? Those with an eye on the data think they're seeing clues about political vision:

Liberals responded strongly to the prompts, consistently moving their attention in the direction suggested to them by a face on a computer screen. Conservatives, on the other hand, did not.

Why? Researchers suggested that conservatives' value on personal autonomy might make them less likely to be influenced by others, and therefore less responsive to the visual prompts....

Liberals may have followed the "gaze cues," meanwhile, because they tend to be more responsive to others, the study suggests.

Hat tip to Mark Shier

Karma Chamomileans

The latest theory about tea party people is that they believe liberals have erred by trying too hard to keep what goes around from coming around.